BGC Galleries

Exhibitions are integral to academic life at the BGC, and they also contribute to the cultural and educational life of New York City.  We examine objects in a broad cultural context from different curatorial points of view. Our focus is on conceiving exhibitions rather than on building or maintaining a permanent collection. Our curators select loans from public and private collections throughout the world. These objects are the material evidence of cultures extending from the ancient world to the present, inclusive of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe.

Established in 1993 the Gallery complements the Center's mission as a leading research center for studies of the material world. We are devoted to enhancing knowledge and awareness of the material world from antiquity to the present.

Located in a townhouse on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the Main Gallery is an intimate environment for viewing exhibitions. The Main Gallery presents three exhibitions annually, curated by members of the faculty, staff, or curatorial consultants with specialized expertise. These exhibitions consider issues and ideas that exist largely outside the established canons of art history. For example, the BGC has organized monographic exhibitions that examined specific architect-designers and thematic ones addressing the role of women in the history of twentieth-century design. Other exhibitions have revealed the meaning of objects as signifiers of different cultural and national identities.

The Main Gallery is also a showcase for exhibitions organized collaboratively with museums in New York City, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New-York Historical Society, and the American Museum of Natural History. Students in our MA and PhD programs are involved in these projects, whose overall aim is to break down some of the false barriers between academic and curatorial forms of inquiry and knowledge. Periodically, the Main Gallery is also a venue for traveling exhibitions that further our mission of exploring the material world.

In addition the BGC organizes small-scale exhibitions that result from the intellectual explorations of the Bard Graduate Center faculty and students with each exhibition being the culmination of a seminar offered in the Center's MA and Ph.D. program. This gallery is a forum for imagining new ways of thinking about and teaching the history of the material world, and creating innovative approaches to exhibition display and interpretation.